Monthly Archives: July 2011

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So, on Friday, we finally held a wake for Nottingham’s former Lib Dem councillors and a few extra people who had worked for us at the council. We struggled to find a date we could all do, as well as an activity that suited everyone – eg pub would be no good for our various teetotal, recovering alcholic or Muslim colleagues. Eventually I offered to cook afternoon tea for everyone.

Which I duly did.

Of course that meant that hosting it here would need a flurry of cleaning to get the house acceptable, but it also gave me an opportunity to use the entire wedding list tea set for the first time (we’ve used bits of it from time to time but never all 8 settings)

Here’s the food I did:

Savouries

Muffaletta Tigers

A Muffaletta sandwich is a huge American thing based on muffaletta bread, which is round and seeded, stacked high with ham and provolone cheese and also includes a sort of pickled olive salad, apparently. I first encountered this from Olive magazine, and their version appears nothing like the American version. And then my version is different again because the only bread that seemed vaguely available in the supermarket was tiger bread, the whole white loafs with crunch toppings. You blend a jar of artichoke hearts (Sainsbugs has them in tins) into some mayonnaise, slice the loaf horizontally and spread the artichoke/mayo mix on the top and bottom. Layer the loaf with lots of ham, a bag of mixed leaf salad and lots of sliced Emmental cheese and put the loaf back together. Press firmly – indeed leave it under a weight if you can, although I couldn’t quite figure out how to do this without the weight sliding off. Slice into individual sandwiches. Secure sandwiches with a toothpick with an optional green olive in the top.

Verdict: this was delicious, and all of it got eaten. But it was a slimy, horribly mess to make, and the top and bottom of the load, despite being secured with toothpicks, got sheared away from each other when sliced. Have to work on the methodology, but will deffo do again. One tin of artichoke hearts and two huge spoons of mayo was far too much for one small tiger loaf.

Tuna rolls

No real mystery here: two tins of tuna, big dollop of mayo, half a red pepper deseeded and chopped very finely spooned into wholemeal rolls and served with thinly sliced cucumbers.

Lorraine Pascale’s Sun-dried tomato and rosemary palmiers

Recipe here. Nice and simple, kept for a couple of days, tasted very nice. Fooled a lot of people who thought from the look of them that they were going to be cake not savoury…

Sweets

Dan Lepard’s cinnamon buns

I have made these once before (recipe here) – and once again they were gorgeous: soft, spicy dough, sweet cinnamon filling. Highly recommended! This time I used the same amount of dough in a much bigger tin and got a much higher yield.

Scones

Quite fortunately on the same day, Woman’s Hour had a feature on how to make the perfect scones, and I used their tips and recipe… except…

I had leftover buttermilk, so substituted some of the milk for that. I must have misidentified the size of my cutter, using my smallest, because I got 16 tiny scones out of half of the dough before giving up and freezing the other half. I didn’t use cherries, just sultanas. (Cherries are for cherry scones! Fruit scones are sultanas only!) Served with clotted cream and strawberry jam.

Chocolate cake

I had been hemming and hawing about which cake to make and finally settled on this one. It got rave reviews, but I found it ever so slightly meh. More a gateau than a cake. I tried to ice it but the ganache topping wasn’t sturdy enough to ice letters onto.

Fruit bowl

A nod to healthiness

Served with

Tea and coffee. Of course.

Conclusion

I quite enjoyed the cooking and people seemed to enjoy eating it, but the cleaning was knackering and it’s hard to divorce the effort of the two in my mind. Perhaps if the house were routinely more clean, this sort of thing would be less of a trial? I thought a few weeks ago that I would try afternoon tea as a way of easing into supperclubs but as I was hoovering and plating and laying the table, I found myself thinking that it was ridiculous that people would pay money to come and eat brown food in a filthy house. I lack the perspective to think whether I am doing myself down or being sensibly realistic.

The other day, out of the blue, I got an email asking me if I would like to review a Kindle case, lamp or cover, along with a handy link to a site called GearZap.com

I’ve been blogging on and off for seven years, now, and I don’t recall this ever happening before, so actually, I jumped at the chance.

Very quickly, they put my chosen Kindle light into the post and I got it the following day.

I needed one because when I first got the Kindle, I eschewed the basic Amazon cover with light in favour of a funkier sort of thing, like this one. When the Kindle arrived, I understood what the light was for. Like traditional books, you can’t read a Kindle in the dark. (The sleeve is indeed funky, has a very soft protective lining, is much more interesting than a boring leather one, and I like it a lot.)

Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but when I took the Kindle camping, it was much more so. I turned at first to a book light I had once won in a Christmas cracker years ago, but this suffered four problems: its rough metal clip scratched my precious kindle; the cheap reflector cast irritating shadows all over the page; it was powered by weird unusual batteries; and worst, despite being originally designed for books it was useless for them as you had to keep repositioning it when you switched from recto to verso.

GearZap sent me an XtraFlex2 Kindle Reading Light – and it’s really good. It instantly fixes all the problems I had before. It has a padded clip that will not harm the finish on the gadget. The high-quality lights and reflectors cast a very strong light in exactly the right place, and the gooseneck allows fine tuning to position it properly. The light is almost as bright as my mains powered bedside light, and it will be very good indeed in a tent. Used with actual books, the twin LEDs in the light head are angled to cover both pages of a book without having to move it. And it takes normal AAA batteries that won’t be at all difficult to secure next time I find myself in a tent, getting carried away, and reading all night.

I’ve never yet seen a review of this type of light with an actual picture of the light attached to the Kindle, so to put that right, here we go:

And this highlights the one slight problem using this light with a Kindle – the deep clip isn’t quite designed to fit the device (unlike, say, this one, which is clearly intended for exactly this product). It is not an insurmountable problem: you can clip the light enough to work at the top, or you can use the full extent of the clip halfway down as pictured.

One final point: this type of device, a personal book light, is often sold as a way of letting one of two people who share a bed continuing to read after the other has fallen asleep. This might work for some people, but it doesn’t work for us. I’m the late reader, but P is a light sleeper. Attempting to read in bed wakes him up. I could sleep through earthquakes, so if ever he wanted to read after I fell asleep, I’m sure it would be fine.

I’ve been keeping late hours baking but as I was getting ready to turn in, the news began breaking about the extent of the awfulness in Norway. As I write, 80 are confirmed dead at a summer camp for youth members of Norway’s ruling Labour party.

It’s terrible, terrible news, all the more vivid for me for the thought that this meeting must have been a similar sort of thing to the dozens run by our own party over the years. None of us would ever have considered Activate, or a Liberal Youth meeting a target for such an atrocity. A swathe cut through an entire generation of young political activists.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who have lost children today.